Determining Aqueous Deuterium Detection Limits via Infrared Spectroscopy to Understand its Capabilities for Real-Time Monitoring of Tritiated Water
Tritiated water will be present in many demonstrator class fusion devices in a wide array of locations and concentrations. Accurate and fast measurement will be a key requirement to ensure suitable process monitoring, safety assurance and tritium tracking is in place. This work quantifies the deuterium detection limits achievable using a benchtop transmission Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) instrument and an industrialised attenuated total reflectance (ATR)-FTIR instrument to understand the capabilities of these techniques for real-time monitoring of aqueous tritium. Deuterium limits of detection of 418 ppm and 8,367 ppm were demonstrated with measurement times of 10s for the transmission FTIR and ATR-FTIR, respectively. These instruments are considered viable for the measurement of high concentration tritiated water and have many potential benefits associated with their deployment.